Well, here’s Part 2 of our Spring Witches collection for 2021 and I don’t think I have anything insightful or witty to go on about like I did last time, although I guess I could touch on this. Has anyone else ever wondered where the idea of these women flying around in the night on broomsticks came from? I have my idea – which are grounded in nothing and have no merits so are probably just the rambling nothings of an old man drinking beer – but what if…

Picture one of those old English villages, away from the castle, where men spent their days hunting for pheasant and digging around in the mud for snails so the local Count or Duke or Earl or whatever could ride down on his fancy horse wearing his fancy fucking pants and steal whatever he wants in the name of the King. Imagine that the local royalty sends him out to go kill some geese and he’s gone for two weeks and one day Mrs Ambrose Thistlebotham and Mrs Yancy Thornpenny are washing out their husband’s shitty underwear in the local river, mainly because the men can’t atop crapping or pissing themselves at night because all they eat are undercooked birds and insect ridden oats.

Mrs Thistlebotham (eyeballing the local shitboy, dumping a bucket downstream): Oh my, dear. Have you seen young lord Woolesfiggins?
Mrs Thornpenny: Oh my, yes. He’s grown to be such a strong and strapping shitboy.
Thistlebotham (fanning her flushed décolletage): My, my. And between his leggings. That’s quite a third leg he’s garnered.
Thornpenny: Too bad he got kicked in the head by that unshod mule when he was a wee tot. He could really steam my cabbage! {FM: or is that a different geography?? HMMM} He could really peter my persimmons! Boil my beets! {I don’t know}

A couple or three weeks later and Mrs Thistlebotham is in her filthy hut, her husband out collecting more fowl. She’s sweeping up her old man’s teeth that fell out a few days earlier due to malnutrition and the general Croop. Outside her window, the stupid shitboy is daydreaming about maidens and unicorns and gets a giant erection. “You MUTHN’T!!” He howls at his lumbering penis but the damage is done. Mrs Thistlebotham handles the end of her broomstick and thinks the unthinkable! It’s too late!! The seed is planted!! The sausage is near the bun!! {Still no??}

Months go by and brooms are crafted at an alarming rate! Who is doing all of this sweeping?? The ground is dirt or mud for fuck’s sake! The regional Broom Union Steward comes by unannounced one day to see who’s stealing his business! He catches them in the act! They’re flying high as kites! Their eyes are rolled back in their heads! They are obviously all in league with Lucifer and have become his depraved, earthly succubae!!! FUCK!!!

Then they are all hunted down, tortured and killed in the name of God. Or a bunch of ’em anyway, Again, that’s just kind of how I see it so if you tell your local pastor about this theory, leave my name out of it.

As to this movie – this thing had a couple of bad things rubbing against it {boobs? balls? I’ll stop!} from this Director: the slow and unremarkable The Blackcoat’s Daughter which has one of my favorites – Emma Roberts – in it and the girl who would go on to be in that new Sabrina show on Netflix, Praise be to Satan! And then the other was the also unremarkable and boring yet somehow-they-almost-made-something-good-if-it-wasn’t-so-fucking-long-and-boring I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House but the only thing that I really remember about that after however many years is that someone died from seeing something and there were a bunch of chairs hung upside down in the kitchen during the entire film for no apparent reason. For this, I thought the trailer looked cool and then saw (the director’s name) and thought: “YOU’RE NOT GETTING MY MONEY AGAIN BUDDY!” and then I ended up watching it for free and I really liked it. Mostly, anyway.

I have a book in my bathroom that supposedly recounts the ‘fairy tales’ before they were childrenized but I never really read too much of it for some reason but this, obviously, isn’t exactly what you might be familiar with. Sure this girl youth and her annoying, endlessly yammering younger brother head off into the woods – to escape their bathshit mom – and they run into some sort of demon which I didn’t really get, eat some mushrooms and get high and then come across this house in the woods. It’s full of an endless supplies of cookies and pastries and hams and shit that the brother-kid eats constantly but he still never stops talking for some even when his mouth is full and there’s also the witch. All of that is good and entertaining and – I don’t know how to put this eloquently even though I am not eloquent, but they pulled off some cool hand acting in this that I really liked.

But for me, something really turned for me as we head into the finale of this thing, – when the witch tells Gretel “You’ve told the story wrong.”

That probably won’t resonate or mean anything to anyone else but it made some sort of weird connection with me. It’s too personal to talk about around here but it really meant something. Another thing that I thought was cool – and I could be very wrong but, was that big book Alice Krige was always fingering {!!} supposed to be some sort of version of The Voynich Manuscript? Were the filmmakers and the prop team that clever? It seems plausible to me the way their fingers were always covered in gunk, I presume from the earth that they were learning to control. And – DUM TA DUM – there is indication and even a scene where they control —— a stick! But not really for what we were talking about earlier.

Speaking of earlier – god damn this has been a long write-up. Is anyone still here? Did I bore you out of the place like Osgood did with I am the Pretty Thing? Am I the real shitboy? Probably! Well – I’ll see if I can string together a shorter part 3 for this series floating around in my head.

Filed under: MIASMA COLLECTIONS